I did this. Was a ThinkPad Linuxer for years and now I just use an M1 for sysadmin/programming/web/vids. Quite happy to just use Linux on my servers these days. MacOS does the job nicely on laptop. I suppose it depends on how FOSS you want to be.

Just use a $5 USB-C to 3.5mm DAC?

I heard about it when it was mentioned on the Trillbilly podcast, about two years ago. Which is quite an obscure way to hear about a project by Tim and Eric. So, yes, it’s not too well known.

I clicked on the thread to mention this excellent Tim & Eric side project. Anyone who likes silliness and hasn’t seen it yet needs to crank up a torrent.

Isn’t it quite common to have /boot on an unencrypted partition?

Wow. I’ve been using dd for years and I’d consider myself on the more experienced end of the Linux user base. I’ll use cp from now on. Great link.

How would the update affect stuff like a GoCryptFS volume which I mount and use periodically but not all the time? Would those files be processed much faster than previously?

ZFS kicks arse. It’s worth learning enough to get a basic array going, with a couple of datasets and encryption. Once you get acquainted with that, you’ll be using it for years to come.

This is why I love having luks covering my entire system disk. If I want to upgrade the system with a new drive or move the drive to a different pc or sell it or dispose of it I just dd the first couple of gigs to obliterate the luks header.

It’s obviously essential to have a backup strategy, of course, but full disk encryption is the only way to go for me.

A centaur has four legs and a horse has four legs, so half a centaur and half a horse would have four legs.

Peter Cook did this joke with infinitely more panache about 30 years ago. Search YouTube for “Peter Cook Clive Anderson talks back”.

Use an old Pi 3B for running zigbee2mqtt on docker.

I used to run just the Linux version of it but decided to install docker on the Pi so it’s as easy as doing docker-compose pull to update it.

This is so I can control my various lights and switches using Home Assistant.

I use a Topping DX1 DAC with Fedora for sending sound to my soundbar. It’s great.

Yeah. I don’t know of an extension. I think you could create an extra Firefox profile and run two versions of Firefox (home and work) at once on the home PC. That might be a compromise that works?

Hmm. I wouldn’t risk it, personally. I bet the data that syncs can be quite specific. Have you looked for an extension that can just do tab syncing?

And the ASRock Deskmini range. I’m currently using one with an older Kaby Lake i7 as my Docker host.

You could (carefully) run a dd command to blast the partition data off the drive, in Linux or any Unix based system.

Let’s say your drive was recognised as /dev/sdc when you plugged it in.

First, make sure it’s unmounted:

1. sudo umount /dev/sdc

Then blast a gigabyte of zeros over the partition information: 2. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1G count=1

The partition information is usually stored on the very first couple of megabytes on the drive, so blasting a gig’s worth of zeros linearly onto it should make it show up as an empty device next time you unplug and plug it in.